S.O.S.

December 24, 2012

Houston, we have a problem. A very serious, genuine problem.

Let me back up though.

We’ve been here for 12 days, and oddly, no one has propositioned me to be best friends for life. Weird, I know. However, we are lucky enough to be invited over tonight by a friend (of a friend). It’s Christmas Eve here, so we’re actually really happy to have some company to spend it with. But more importantly, we recognize that we must make friends of our only prospects, and therefore I am pulling out the big guns.

Cookies. Who doesn’t like homemade chocolate chip cookies, warm out of the oven? No one I trust.

Thus began the great cookie adventure of Christmas ’12. Ingredients weren’t actually too terribly hard to find. The baking soda doesn’t come in an orange box, which is totally wrong, but all other ingredients are pretty good to go…

Except. One. Thing.

The key ingredient, chocolate chips, are totally wrong. I started with “dark chocolate chip buttons” because the packaging appealed to me and they claimed to be dark chocolate. Thank goodness I sampled them before getting too far from the store (don’t judge me). Gross! Like the chocolate surrounding a Cadbury Cream Egg… waxy and way too sweet.

Like any self respecting cook, I turned around and exchanged my other un-opened package for a bag that simply said “Dark Chocolate Chips”, and the ingredient list (which I’ve never had to check on chocolate chips before!) started with “cocoa solids” instead of “sugar” which I took as a good sign.

Foiled again. Instead of big wax buttons, I got small wax tidbits. I’m on the fence about whether mouthfuls of weird chocolate is better than bites of cookie with such little chocolate chips you can’t taste them. Either way, fail.

They look deceiving…

See the micro-chip size? What the heck?

But they’re just wrong. And I find this so alarming, it’s obviously worth writing home about. These sub-par chocolate impostors better not cost me my new friendship.

If anyone in New Zealand knows where to find real chocolate, I’m all ears.

If anyone in America wants to send me real chocolate, well you’ll get a super peppy post dedicated to you in my blog… but that’s about it, really.